The fully automated system came online in July at Collaborative Laboratory Services, located in Saint Francis Hospital and Medical Center. The new system can process up to 1,200 specimens an hour, said Mary Onoroski, the lab's technical services manager.

It took six months to fully install and prepare the new robotic line, which carries out procedures that had been done manually.

"lack of qualified medical technology personnel". *snort* what a load of excrement. We get it. You would rather spend money on robots that don't expect decent pay and benefits. But please don't LIE about the reason. Because now, you have to hire or train PEOPLE who can do...

With the new equipment, the staff is aiming to finish most of the testing in 30 to 60 minutes, half of the time it used to take. Before the new machines came in, the lab had technologists load specimens onto stand-alone instruments and move the samples from one machine to another for testing.

"The laboratory is kind of a behind-the-scenes department, but it plays a very crucial role in supporting the physicians and providing diagnostic testing results so that they can make clinical judgment in a very timely fashion," said Kathleen Luczyk, the lab's chief operating officer.

The automated equipment also helps solve the problem of a lack of qualified medical technology personnel, Luczyk said, while also cutting operating costs.

The robotic system, which works around the clock, runs like an assembly line.

On a recent afternoon, five robotic grippers picked up tubes of blood samples and put them in the centrifuge as 11 medical technologists and technicians worked alongside the 150-foot-long line, monitoring the system and checking test results.

The centrifuge spun the specimens to separate the blood cells from the serum. The line then carried the samples to an analyzer for testing, recapped the tubes, and then sent them to the refrigerator for storage. The results would be automatically uploaded and eventually put into the patient's medical record unless they are abnormal.

"All that happens without a technologist touching the sample," Onoroski said. "Once it's put on the automated line, it doesn't need to be handled by hands again, which makes it a very efficient system. And it allows the technologists to do the things they've been trained to do outside the specimen processing."

The lab arranged training with the vendor Beckman Coulter, a diagnostics and life sciences technology manufacturer based in California.

"Our technologists have totally embraced the new system," Onoroski said. "They were a little apprehensive up front, which was totally understandable because they had used a different analyzer for many years. And It's not just the change in the technology, but the change in the work flow."

The Kraft Heinz Company is voluntarily recalling select code dates and manufacturing codes of Kraft Singles individually-wrapped cheese product slices due to the possibility that a thin strip of the individual packaging film may remain adhered to the slice after the wrapper has been removed.

The state is offering a $1.5 million subsidized loan at 2 percent to TELLING Industries, a metal framing manufacturer that bought an industrial building in Windsor for $1,350,000 earlier this year, according to a trade publication.